I told you you could trust me. I told you I would save you.
31
Frank carried Grigor into the house, seating him in a soft armchair in the living room, where his view ranged from the TV set on the left to the picture window and Wilton Road on the right. Kwan made his own way into the house, and collapsed onto the sofa, breathing with his mouth open.
Maria Elena took Pami to the kitchen to help put together some sort of dinner for everybody, but Pami knew nothing about kitchens and preparing food; it was embarrassing for them both. So Pami soon left and went back to the living room.
By the time Frank returned from the ground-floor half-bath, where he’d been washing the tire-changing grime off his hands, Pami and Grigor were deep in medical conversation and Kwan seemed to be asleep, so he went off to the kitchen, where he found a beer in the refrigerator, then sat at the kitchen table and watched Maria Elena work.
He had about forty thousand left, out of the East St. Louis money; almost a third gone already, on nothing at all. But it was an easy way to live, not nervous, not hustling all the time, not just barely scraping along. Frank hadn’t broken into a house or a store for almost a month now, and he didn’t miss the experience a bit.
Mary Ann Kelleny’s advice came back to him: don’t do constant little hits all the time, exposing yourself to risk over and over, but do it all at once, in one big major haul. The five-million-dollar hit. Well, fifty-seven grand wasn’t exactly five million, but it showed the principle was sound.
Sitting there at the kitchen table, watching Maria Elena at her domestic work, Frank felt as though he was at some sort of watershed moment of his life. Already he could see that this was the place to turn himself back into a loner; Maria Elena would be happy to take Pami and Kwan off his hands. She liked worrying about fucked-up sick people, you could see that. Then from here, alone, Frank could maybe drive on up to Boston, hole in somewhere, try to think about that five-million-dollar hit.
People pulled jobs like that in the movies all the time, right? So what did they do, what kind of thing? Break into Fort Knox. Steal The Love Boat and hold it for ransom. All these make-believe capers pulled by platoons of good buddies, as well-drilled as the Green Berets.
Is that what the five-mil hit is supposed to look like? Then forget it, because it isn’t realistic. Unless there’s five million dollars lying in a room somewhere that one man can get into and grab and get out again, there’s no such thing as the five-mil hit. No such thing.
So what was realistic? If a man got tired of exposing himself to the risks a hundred times a year for shit-poor returns, what could he do instead? Where was there even a fifty-seven-grand hit, three or four times a year? (Without any weak-hearted old man in it, please.) Money isn’t cash any more, not usually, it’s electronic impulses between banks, it’s charge cards and pieces of paper and phone calls.
Frank would leave all that stuff to another generation to figure out how to loot; what he needed was tangibles. Money, or for second best, jewelry. And the greater the concentration of money or jewelry into one place, the tighter the security.
Maria Elena broke into Frank’s thoughts when she put a bowl of carrots onto the table and said, “Excuse me. Would you do these carrots?”
Frank looked at them, overflowing the bowl, their long green fernlike tops still on, the carrots themselves large and thick and hairy. He had no idea what she wanted from him. “Do?”
She put a wooden chopping block on the table in front of him, with a small sharp knife and a scraper. “Cut the ends off each one,” she said, “and scrape the skin off.”
“Well, I’ll try it,” Frank said.
She was amused by him, but in a low-key way, as though she hadn’t known she could be amused by anything. Moving back over toward the sink, she said, “Have you never had a wife to ask you to do these things?”
“Never,” Frank told her. “And in diners they pretty much do it themselves.”
“It is very easy to learn,” she assured him.
“I’ll give it a whack,” Frank said, and did just that, decapitating one of the carrots. The knife was good and sharp. He nicked off the narrow end of the carrot, feeling pretty much on top of this job, and then had a hell of a time getting the scraper to work. It kept turning around on him, rubbing along the hairy skin of the carrot without accomplishing anything. “Bugs Bunny eats it with the hair still on,” he pointed out, but she ignored him.
Once he got the hang of the scraper, Frank finished off the carrots with no trouble at all, and then Maria Elena gave him a bowl of potatoes to work the scraper magic on. “I gotta have another beer if it’s gonna go on like this,” he complained, and she brought him one.
Weird place to be. In the living room, Pami and Grigor had turned on the TV, and the sounds of music and voices came from there. The warm kitchen was beginning to smell very good. Frank sat at the table, sipping his beer and peeling the potatoes. The five-million-dollar hit, he thought. Where’s the five-million-dollar hit?
The dining room table seated twelve; plenty of room to spread out. They ate roast lamb and two kinds of sausage and boiled potatoes and three kinds of vegetables and a salad.
All except Kwan, that is. Since he couldn’t swallow any solid food, Maria Elena had made for him various drinks in the Cuisinart, giving him also a mixture of honey and warm water (known long ago as melicrate) to help soothe his throat between sips of the other liquids.
Since Kwan was sitting with the others, at their insistence, but couldn’t eat, Maria Elena gave him a pen and yellow pad and pushed him to let them all know who and what he was. His despair was such (he was trying to figure out how to die without interference from all these unlikely do-gooders) that she had to press a lot, but finally he gave in and wrote as few words as possible, sketching his brief history.
That’s how Frank learned he wasn’t a Jap after all, but was a Chinese named Li Kwan. And Grigor, who was reading Kwan’s notes aloud, suddenly recognized Kwan when Tiananmen Square was mentioned: “I saw your photo. With the, the...” Frustrated, Grigor held his cupped hand in front of his mouth.
“Bullhorn,” Kwan wrote, and finished his biography, and went away to sit in the living room, where they couldn’t question him any more.
They did come in with him later on, but not to pester him. There was a general desire to watch the eleven o’clock news. Maria Elena closed the sliding drapes over the living room’s picture window and the possible eyes of neighbors, they all found places to sit, and the sound-bites of news started: little digestible chunks of events. A chunk from Russia, a chunk from Washington, a chunk from Alaska, a chunk from Berlin.
The first chunk after the first commercial break was about the strike and demonstration at the Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Pickets and police surged in a confused scrum, and a yellow school bus with some difficulty made the turn and drove through the gate. Within its windows could be seen embarrassed-looking middle-aged men and women. Then the neutral, the lobotomized, the castrated off-camera voice told the viewers that the plant was being kept on active status by managers and supervisors, who kept a skeleton staff in the mostly automated plant twenty-four hours a day. The disputed research continued, safely. Dutchess and Columbia county citizens were assured that power outages would not occur.
“Outage,” Grigor said. “What a word that is.”
“They are very good, officials,” Maria Elena said, “at finding the words that put the people to sleep.”